Vaping smoke production

[Big Jim]

Here is a thought that I had since "Vaping" has made the national news lately:

Have you ever been in your car following behind someone who was using one of the e-cigarettes and exhaling a cloud of smoke so thick you would think that they had blown their engine?
The way the e-cigarettes work was shown on TV the other day and I thought that some of the model railroad guys who live to see more and more smoke come from their engines ought to be able to rig one of these things up to cloud up their layout room!

[chuck]

That's basically what most toy train "smoke units" are. E-Cigs cause the rapid atomization of glycol or glycerin like a "fog machine". Some fog machines actually use light weight oils just like a toy train smoke unit does.

It's more like the e-cig people stole the idea from the toy train people.

[Big Jim]

It's more like the e-cig people stole the idea from the toy train people.

And they have done a much better job of it too!

[robert.]

E-cigs gave an unfair advantage.over toy trains. They are powered by a pair of human lungs.

[chuck]

The vaping effect is actually pretty short in duration and the "fade out" is pretty dramatic. It looks more like a special effect from Harry Potter than the way the usual toy train smoke dissipates. This is a vaporized liquid that is trying to get back to a liquid state. The extremely fine droplets that cause the dense "smoke" effect rapidly combine to make larger droplets and then condense out as mist. The vape cloud almost tears itself apart.

I was behind a pickup truck and the driver was vaping. At first I thought he may have dropped a real cigar/cigarette in his lap and his pants were on fire. I was about to press the OnStar button to call for fire department when the dense white cloud disappeared. It didn't drift off, it disappeared. That's when I realized it was an e-cig and not real smoke.

As Robert pointed out this also isn't a small fan driven blower. A pair of lungs can push out a fair volume of material. I don't think they could get a toy train fan blower unit to push out anything like the volume from a pair of lungs. The amount of fluid would be impressive as would the mess it would create on condensing. They were running some of MTH's early fan driven units at a train show at the heaviest smoke output settings and after 30 minutes of run time they had to stop running the trains and wipe down/clean the track. There was so much smoke fluid on the rails that the metal wheeled engines were slipping and some of the traction tired ones were throwing tires.